New York,
Since completing his studies in Fine Arts at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1968, a time when the movement was emerging in California Light and SpaceMary Corse has investigated the effects of materials on the perception of spaces using an abstract, geometrically precise and gesturally subtle language. She experimented early on with canvases of various shapes, plexiglass and illuminated boxes until, at the end of the 1960s, she discovered glass microspheres, an industrial component used in traffic signs and highway dividing lines, and began combining her refractory beads with acrylic paint, giving rise to compositions that seem to radiate light from within and appear to transform depending on their environment and the viewer’s position when looking at them.
Later he continued using them in his series White Light and Black Lightin this last case combining them with black acrylic, works that preceded Black Eartha set of works based on large ceramic plates that she fired in a custom-built kiln and glazed in black. After nearly thirty years of working in monochrome, she decided to reintroduce primary tones into her paintings, starting from a conception of colour as a component of white light and thus emphasising the abstract nature of human perception, in which very individual feelings and consciousness come into play.
Her first solo exhibition in a museum came in 2018 (it was “Mary Corse: A Survey in Light,” which was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and then at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and, since this month, Corse returns to Pace Gallery, her usual venue, to exhibit her recent creations in parallel with her participation in the collective “Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945–1990” at the Palm Springs Art Museum. In these latest works she has persisted in her investigations into light as a subject and material, a subject she decided to delve into after experiencing a sort of epiphany while driving along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu at dusk in her youth: she noticed how her headlights progressively illuminated the road markings as she moved forward and, when investigating the causes of this effect, she found the aforementioned glass microspheres, which improve visibility in road signs. In his paintings, as we said, this lighting is projected from the same plane of the painting.
At Pace we will find a new series of diamond-shaped paintings with microspheres on their surface; he has returned to this specific form for the first time in nearly sixty years, surely because the return to what has already been done, to the initial ideas, which involve the investigation into the metaphysical aspect of creation, is another of the axes of his process. The unpublished installation has arrived at the gallery Halo Room: It has an architectural character and, although it has been placed in the centre of the interior space, it could also be placed outdoors; in either case it can offer a participatory and intimate experience based on scale, space and light. At the exact moment when a spectator enters it, the lighting coming from inside the piece projects its shadow onto a white light painting, giving rise to a bright halo constructed from the shadow of the visitor, so that his presence, while being recorded, is incorporated into the work itself.
Since this installation depends on the energetic relationship between the individual and the object, it is generated when a certain collision approaches that Corse considers intersubjective and that would facilitate a spiritual manifestation of the bodies in space; that is the reason that entry is only allowed within Halo Room with two spectators at a time and each one only being able to appreciate his or her own halo; the American seeks to ensure that her creations provide fundamentally personal experiences.
His is not a unique case, although it is very significant, of the development of this type of concern among American artists in the late sixties: in his 1967 essay Art and objectualityMichael Fried openly criticized minimalist aesthetics for its theatrical nature and advocated the consolidation of an integral painting, in which the viewer could perceive the entire composition at once, in a single instant. He called this quality presentnesspresence, and identified it with grace. In a way, Corse’s work comes to represent a counterpoint to this theory: the presence of the work and that of the spectator within it, both literally and pictorially, would also become an expression of grace, a reflection of ethos.
Mary Corse. “Presence in Light”
PACE GALLERY
540 West 25th Street
New York
From September 13 to October 26, 2024
